Optimum Design of Hybrid Mass Damper for Vibration

Control of MDOF Structures

By A. S. Ahlawat and A. Ramaswamy
Doctoral Candidate Assistant Professor
Department of Civil Engineering
Indian Institute of Science
Bangalore, 560 012, INDIA.
Email: fanuahl, ananthg@civil.iisc.ernet.in
Abstract
An optimal design approach for a hybrid mass damper (HMD) system, (tuned
mass damper (TMD) + active mass driver (AMD)) for seismically excited building
structures has been discussed. A dierent arrangement of the HMDs has been
used so that this system can control the torsion mode of vibration eectively
in addition to the exure modes. To examine the eectiveness of the proposed
system for torsional modes of vibration, a set of earthquake exitations has been
applied at dierent angles, varying from 0o to 90o. The genetic algorithm has been
used to nd the optimum values of the HMD parameters. The proposed design
procedure has been demonstrated using numerical examples.
Key-Words : Hybrid Control, Optimal Control, Hybrid Mass Damper, Tall
Structures, Vibration Control, Genetic Algorithms.
INTRODUCTION
Over the past few decades, tremendous progress has been made towards making
structural control a viable technology for enhancing structural functionality and
safety against natural hazards such as strong earthquakes and high winds (Housner
et al. 1997). The control of structure can be implemented using either active,
passive, semi-active or hybrid control strategy. The passive control is now a
mature technology. Passive control systems have been implemented in a number
of full scale buildings throughout the world (Soong and Constantinou 1994, Soong
and Dargush 1997). Active vibration control has received considerable attention
over the last two decades (Spencer et al. 1998).
Both the active and passive control system have their limitations. An active
control system is dependent on external power which is quite high in case of
control of civil engineering structures. This makes such systems vulnerable to
power failure, which is always a possibility during a strong earthquake. Due to
the high power requirement, it is dicult to provide an active control system with
its own dedicated power supply. Passive control system on the other hand suers
from limited capability to control the structural response.
A hybrid control is a viable solution to alleviate some of the limitation that exist
for either a passive or an active control system acting alone. In case of power
failure or failure of the active control component, the passive component of the
hybrid control still oers some degree of protection, thus making the system fail-
safe, an essential design requirement for life-line structures. A hybrid control
system requires less power as compared to an active one, and a dedicated power
supply can also be provided to make the system less vulnerable to power failure.
Many researchers have developed optimal design approaches for TMD and AMD
systems for the structures excited by seismic and wind loads (Housner et al. 1997).
Most of these approaches are based on either single degree of freedom (SDOF)

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equivalent model of structure or a multi dergree of freedom (MDOF) equivalent
model of structure considering fewer modes of vibration. Muhammad and Aradi
(1998) have presented an approach for optimal design of TMD and Ahlawat and
Ramaswamy (2000) have presented an approach for optimal design of HMD, for
MDOF structures excited by seismic loads, without specifying the modes to be
controlled. These approaches have been applied to a shear building (plain frame)
model with unidirectional excitations. Equivalently, these methods are also ap-
plicable to three-dimetional structures that have no eccentric axes of rotation and
inertia and which are subjected to unidirectional excitation. However, a three
dimentional structure with eccentric location of axes of rotation and inertia has
coupled lateral and torsional responses, even when excited unidirectionally. Fur-
ther, since earthquakes are not unidirectional natural phenomena in general, it
would seems logical to model structures as a three dimensional system.
An optimal design approach for a HMD system, consisting of TMD and AMD as
its passive and active control system components respectively, for a seismically
excited torsionally coupled building structures has been presented in this paper.
In the present approach a HMD system is considered to be applied to MDOF
structure, but without specifying the modes to be controlled. Therefore, there
is no need to transform the structure to a SDOF or a MDOF model having few
exure modes. An arrangement of the HMDs as shown in Fig. 1(b) has been used
to control the torsional modes eectively.
There are many optimization criteria which have been used by researchers, for
active control such as a linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) (Chang and Soong
1980), H2 (Lublin et al. 1996), H1 (Lublin et al. 1996) performance index,
which minimize the structural response while keeping the control energy to be
used within the practical limit. For passive control, performance index used by
researchers are the same as used for active control but there is no constraint on
control energy requirement (Gluck et al. 1996).
Actual earthquake data has been used as an excitation in addition to a simulated
earthquake (band limited white noise ltered by Kanai-Tajimi lter). To inves-
tigate the eectiveness of the proposed system to control the torsion modes of
the vibration, excitation has been applied at dierent angle varying from 0o to
90o.The peak structural response, nondimensionalized by uncontrolled structural
response, has been used as a performance index in the present study. Most of
the optimization methods used in control design are traditional gradient based
search methods. However there are diculties associated with these methods in
selecting a suitable continuously dierentiable cost function. Genetic algorithms
(GAs) eeciently nd an optimal solution from the complex and possibly non-
convex discontinuous solution space (Michalewicz 1996). Considering the poten-
tial capability, GA is utilized in the present study for optimization of the HMD
system parameters, as the optimization problem is not necessarily convex. To
demonstrate the procedure, the optimal HMD has been designed for the exam-
ple problem of multi-storey torsionally coupled building subject to earthquake
loading.
STATE-SPACE MODEL OF STRUCTURE
Consider an N-storey torsionally coupled building with hybrid mass damper (HMD)
system installed at the top oor as shown in g. 1. The linear time invariant state-
space representation of the input-output model for the structure is described by

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 HMD SYSTEM

mN
HMD

N H H
mN-1 M M
D D

HMD

N-1 (b) Typical Location of the HMDs

on Top Floor of the Building
m2

ma
2 kd
m1 md
cd

(c) Typical Arrangement of a HMD

Z

1
Y

X α
..
xg
(a)Idealized Model of Torsionally Coupled N Storey Building

Figure 1: Idealized N-storey building with HMD (TMD + AMD)

the following equations.

x_ = Ax + Bu + E xg (1)

ym = Cy x + Dy u + Fy xg + v (2)

z = Cz x + Dz u + Fz xg (3)
In these equations x is the state vector, xg is the scaler ground acceleration, u is
the scaler control input, ym is the vector of measured responses, z is the vector of
controllable responses, v is the vector of measurement noises and A, B, E, Cy , Dy ,
Fy , Cz , Dz , Fz are matrices of appropriate dimensions. These coecient matrices
are determined from the mass, stiness and damping matrices of the structure and
the controller. In view of seeking a realistic model, sensor noise (v), discretization
error and saturation of analog to digital converter (ADC) and digital to analog
converter (DAC) have also been considered in the model.
CONTROLLER DESIGN
The control design problem is to determine the mass, stiness, damping of the
TMD component of the HMD system and a discrete time, feedback compensator
of the form
xck+1 = f1(xck ; yk ; uk ; k) (4)

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 uk = f2(xck ; yk ; k) (5)
for the AMD component of the HMD. Here xck , yk and uk are the state vector
for the compensator, the output vector and the control command, respectively, at
time t = kT.
OPTIMIZATION PROBLEM
In the present problem the objective is to minimize the maximum of the nondi-
mensionalized peak interstorey drift due to the earthquake excitations. For each
of the earthquake signals, the peak drifts have been nondimensionalized with re-
spect to the uncontrolled peak Nth oor displacement, denoted xNo . Therefore
the objective function is given by
" ( )#
f = earthquake
maxrecords max jd1(t)j ; jd2(t)j ;





; jdN (t)j (6)
t x No x No xNo
where di(t) is maximum interstorey drift for ith storey i.e. maximum of the two
dierences (x, y direction) between absolute displacements for ith storey and (i-
1)th storey.
The parameters specied prior to the solution of the optimization problem are the
boundary conditions, material properties e.g. mass, stiness and damping of the
structure and the earthquake excitation signals, which remain constant.
Mass, stiness and damping for TMD and transfer function parameters for the
AMD have been considered as design variables.
Design constraints include constraints for maximum capacity of the actuator for
all the four AMDs i.e. maximum limit on displacement, acceleration and control
command for the actuator, practical limit on the total mass of the HMD, maxi-
mum possible stiness Kd and damping Cd for TMD component of HMD. These
constraints have been formulated as given by following equations.
max
t
ju(t)j  umax (7)

max
t
jxm (t)j  xmmax (8)

max
t
jxam (t)j  xammax (9)
X p XN
0 (md + ma )  100 mi (10)
i=1
0  Kd  Kdmax (11)

0  Cd  Cdmax (12)
where u(t) is the vector of control commands, xm (t) is the vector of displacements
and xam (t) is vector of accelerations of the actuators at time t. umax, xmmax
and xammax are the limiting values of the control command, displacement and
acceleration of the actuator, respectively. md , ma and mi are mass of TMD, mass

4
 K
Constant K
Mux x’ = Ax+Bu
zout
y = Cx+Du
elc_a.mat Matrix Z Vector to
Multiport Gain Workspace
Structure
Earthquake Switch
(Evaluation Model)
(in volts)
hach_a.mat

Earthquake
(in Volts)1
Sensor
numeq(s) Noises

deneq(s)
Band−Limited Kanai−Tajimi
White Noise Filter

1/z usignal
Unit Delay Command Signal
to Workspace
time
Variable Initialization
Clock Time Vector
to Workspace

y(n)=Cx(n)+Du(n)
DAC ADC
x(n+1)=Ax(n)+Bu(n)

Discrete Controller

Figure 2: SIMULINK model for N-storey shear building with HMD (TMD +
AMD)

of AMD and mass of the ith storey respectively. p is the limiting percentage mass
of the HMD to the total mass of the building .
GENETIC ALGORITHM
Genetic algorithm (GA) was developed by Holland and has been documented in
his pioneering book in this area (Holland 1992). GA searches for the possible
solution from many dierent points, such that it is easy to nd a nearly global
optimum solution even in the case of a non-convex problems. Moreover it does
not need a gradient of the function to be optimized and the function need not to
be essentialy continuous. It is a computational representation of natural selection,
making the analogy that in survival of the ttest an individual more t for its
environment is akin to a more optimal design. This analogy includes representing
designs as individuals in a population, performing selection (survival of ttest)
and crossover of a generation of these designs to create children, who in turn
become the population for the next generation. Furthering this mimicry of natural
selection, an individual design is represented by a chromosome, generally a binary
string of 1s and 0s that represent the design parameter values (value of the design
variables) for each individual.
SOLUTION PROCEDURE
The model of the structure has been simulated using MATLAB(1999) and SIMULINK
(1998), as shown in g. 2. Three earthquake spectra namely El-Centro (1940),
Hachinohe (1968) and simulated earthquake using Kanai-Tazimi lter have been
used. The earthquake excitations has been applied at dierent angles varrying
from 0o to 90o. Sensor noise and quantization and saturation error of the analog
to digital converter (ADC) and digital to analog converter (DAC) have been con-
sidered to make the model more realistic. Optimal parameter of the HMD system
to minimize the nondimensional peak interstorey drift has been found out using
GA.
OPTIMAL HMD DESIGN PROBLEM
To illustrate the procedure, optimal HMD has been designed for an example

5
structure. The parameters used for SIMULINK model of the structures were
taken to be the following :
Integration time step of 0.0005 sec., sampling time of 0.001 sec., ADC and DAC
with resolution of 12bit, saturation at  3 volts, sensor noise of 0.01 volts rms i.e.
0.3 % of the span of the ADC. Parameters used for GA were, the population size
50, max number of generations 500, probability of crossover 0.45 and probability
of mutation 0.01. Constraints for the actuator have been taken from Spencer et
al. (1998). Limiting values of the parameters the HMD has been taken as mass
0.03 % of the total mass of the building, stiness Kdmax 4000 kN/m, damping
Cdmax 1000 kN-s/m.
ILLUSTRATED EXAMPLE
To illustrate the eectiveness of the HMD system, an eight-storey torsionally cou-
pled building with HMD system at the top oor has been taken as an example.
Fig. 1(a) shows an idealized model of such a building, analyzed by Kan and
Chopra (1977) and which has been used in this study. The idealized building
consists of rigid oor decks supported on massless axially inextensible columns.
The modeling assume that the centres of mass and the elastic axes of the oors
need not coincide. Therefore, the structure has eccentricities. Various properties
of structure has been taken from Fur et al. (1996). All the oors are identical
with mass m = 345.6 t, centroidal mass moment of inertia Ic = 2:37104t ; m2 ,
elastic translational stiness along x-direction kx = 340400kN=m, elastic transla-
tional stiness along y-direction ky = 450300kN=m, and elastic torsional stiness
dened at the centre of mass kt = 38400000kN=rad. The dimention of building
along x- and y-directions are 15 m and 24 m, respectively. The x- and y-direction
eccentricities has been dened as rxc = ex=rg and ryc = ey =rg , respectively, where
ex and ey has been reered as static eccentricities and rg is the radious of gyra-
tion. The assembled mass and stiness matrices of the entire structure has been
determined using the method proposed by Kan and Chopra (1977). The structure
has been assumed to be Rayleigh damped, with damping ratio 2 %.
The result of the simulation of structure with optimal HMD shows that a signif-
icant reduction in structural vibration can be achieved using HMD instead of an
optimal TMD.
CONCLUSIONS
Contributions emerged in this paper are :
1. The advantages of the proposed method are primarily its simplicity and
exibility as the objective function and constraints can be incorporated in a
single tness function and desired weights can be assigned to the objective
and constraints.
2. The development of an approach for optimal design of hybrid mass damper
(HMD) system for tostionally coupled MDOF structure.
3. As the sensor noise and quantization and saturation errors have been consid-
ered in the developed model, more realistic representation of actual hybrid
control system has been achieved.
4. Results show that vibration of the structure can signicantly reduced us-
ing HMD and the HMD sytem is very eective in controlling the torsional
vibrations.
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